Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

I’m an avid sports fan. I’ve watched my favorite teams win World Series titles and Super Bowls along with NBA and college football championships. Never ever in my life did I think I would get super-hyped up about golf. But I get that way. Not about the way I play. I suck. It’s more about who I root for. 

It was 12 years ago or so, early morning Mother’s Day. My wife and I were contemplating the start of the day when a knock came at the door behind which I was trying to sleep, perchance to dream. It was my son Ian knocking. 

What now, I thought. I was just hoping one of Ian’s pals needed a ride home.That was common. And trust me, the request could have been more complicated. Ian asked if “we” could come into the room. The person with Ian had something for somebody. Okay. Of course.This was logical. After all, it was Mother’s Day and someone thoughtful like Gia or Avery probably had some flowers for my wife: a gift for hosting them and putting up with many other less mindful guests during weekend nights and occasional early mornings. It was just kind of bizarre that my kid and some unknown companion wanted an audience not long after the sun rose. Then again, it wasn’t all that strange. 

As soon as we agreed to receive the company, the door opened and this tall, handsome dude beat Ian to the punch and made a beeline for me. I recognized him immediately. He handed me a spanking new mid-layer jacket with a San Francisco Giants logo on the left chest. I really didn’t know what to say. I love the Giants more than I love certain things in life that shouldn’t matter all that much. But these baseball things— they do matter to me. The Giants connect me to my older brother who never got to see our team win those World Series trophies in 2010, 2012 and 2014. For the love of God, man. He never got to see the Giants win a World Series at all. The kid who gave me the jacket knew this about me and the Giants and my brother. Maybe he didn’t know everything about the connection. But he obviously knew something about it. 

It turns out this kid had just returned to Pennsylvania from playing some uber-competitive golf match in the San Francisco Bay Area. When he saw the jacket, he couldn’t resist. 

The kid’s name is Brandon Matthews. He’s not so much a kid anymore. He’s married to his lovely wife Danielle and they have a beautiful baby girl named Vienna. But, in case you didn’t notice ten times so far, I’ll call anyone a kid if he or she is more than three years younger than me. There is that. And I think goats are pretty cool, too. 

As I write this on May 3, 2025, our family friend is chasing down Scottie Scheffler for a chance to win the Byron Nelson Classic in Texas. Scheffler is the world’s number one golfer right now. Brandon is working his way back from injury and this particular weekend might signify a huge turning point in his golf career. 

It’s not a contact sport but injuries happen when, like Brandon, you hit a golf ball the length of four football fields, and the dimpled little son-of-a-bitch travels nearly 200 miles per hour off the face of your pricey shit-talking Srixon driver. But I shouldn’t use the second-person viewpoint in this instance. Because you can’t hit a golf ball like that. Only Brandon and perhaps a couple other dudes in the whole axial blue world can do that. 

Many people hope to smoke the ball. About 68 million people around the world play golf, give or take since I pulled this figure off the irrefutable source of truth known as the internet. But let’s just go with it. 

An overwhelming majority of those millions play the game solely for fun. And every single one of the hackers and the persons who take it a little more seriously would give their left something-or-other to golf like Brandon. Good luck, my brothers and sisters. Good luck and goodnight, sweet princes and princesses. 

It ain’t easy being real good, folks.The PGA app tracks about one thousand ranked male professional golfers and that indicates fewer than two guys make it to the big time among every 100,000 golfers.The other 99,998 never stand a chance. The odds are a 60,000 to 1 shot. And those odds of success get worse when you have to keep looking over your shoulder at the legions of teenage whiz kids and equally hungry seasoned guys who are chasing the dream of playing on the PGA Tour. Or the Korn Ferry Tour. Or the Americas Tour. Etc. Etc. 

I’ve known Brandon since he was eleven. As a Little League manager, I had the unenviable task of trying to keep his bat in check when facing his team. His eleven-year-old voice didn’t quite boom at that time but his bat most certainly did. We tried to pitch around him. I never had to look up from the scorebook to know he just hit a ball 300 feet or more into the scrub trees in the good, old Avoca flats, where guys like National Baseball Hall of Famers Hughie Jennings and Bucky Harris played more than a century ago. You just know the sound of a bomb when you hear it. And after the explosions you vividly remember specific conversations when they accurately predict the future. 

“He’s a helluva baseball player,” I said to my friend, Tommy McDermott, who knew Brandon’s family well. “He can get somewhere with that talent.” 

“He’s a great ballplayer,” Tommy said. “But when he gets somewhere, it’s not gonna be with a baseball bat. It’s gonna be with a golf club.” 

I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was. I knew he was a great baseball player. He also may have scored more points as a grade school basketball player than the illustrious Mount Carmel Marauder: JoJo Monichelli. And in the little northeast Pennsylvania borough of Dupont— where geese are reputed to fly backwards and the trees sometimes come between the twos and the fours— everybody bowled at the little six- or eight-lane (nobody will text me back to verify the exact number of lanes) alley called Elko’s. Well, it turned out that Brandon was some kind of crazy-ass record-holding kegler also. Now I know why his dad Teddy always grinned widely with a bit of a humble aw-shucks vibe, like he knew something I didn’t. Because he did.

We had a wholesale gathering of kids in our garage back in those days. Back in the days when Brandon knew he could succeed as a pro golfer. Then and even after he began to tour, he always made it a point to walk in the house to chat with my wife and me on those evenings. And this I shall never forget. Along with being talented, he’s just a good kid. I’m not looking to save face when I add that ninety-seven percent of my sons’ friends are what my older brother called good people. 

I noticed Brandon carried himself assuredly upright as his golf prospects began to soar. Some view it as cockiness. I call bullshit on that take. I see it as supreme confidence. And maybe distinguishing brash from belief in one’s self is simply a matter of semantics. Because you need a little of both to sink a tricky putt for an enormous payday. Or to bounce back and get under the cut line after you had a few shots land where you absolutely don’t want them to land. Talk to anyone who golfs. They’ll tell you. The scale of their stories will be less grand— relegated to a much smaller stage— but they will tell you how it works. 

In light of all this, I’ve come to enjoy golf partly because of Brandon Matthews. But mostly because it’s four-plus hours I can spend with two of my own sons who love golf more than the average person. That beautiful 7000-yard walk is far from spoiled on days I can pass that much time with my sons. 

Before I close, I gotta be straight with my readers and with my favorite golfer. I get upset when things go sour for him. With other sports, I bitch about dropped passes or watching called third strikes whistle by the waists of San Francisco Giant hitters. It now extends to him missing the fairway or hitting an errant shot out of the bunker. It’s just that I want him to win more than any of those pro sports teams I follow. But I should dial it back a bit. I’m just another armchair idiot who can’t even dream at night about scoring an eagle on a par five. I must therefore learn to keep my mouth shut. Because my conscious mind understands the ridiculousness of placing the mere hope of impossible feats in my subconscious. My brain won’t even attempt to do that. I realize this when the vision of hitting great golf shots never precedes my sleepy dreams of the seemingly more achievable feat of flying like a little birdie. 

I still have that San Francisco Giants jacket. It’s in pristine condition. Maybe if it stays in good shape, I can will it to Brandon when I croak. But he’s a Phillies fan. I don’t think he’d relish wearing a grey-and-orange-and-black Giants jacket. And besides, I happen to think he’d look much, much better in a green one.